Source code online books for professionals by professionals

particular. If you don’t, perhaps my book Beginning Python can help? The Python web site also has a lot of useful 
material, and Python is a really easy language to learn. There is some math in the pages ahead, but you don’t have to 
be a math prodigy to follow the text. You’ll be dealing with some simple sums and nifty concepts such as polynomials, 
exponentials, and logarithms, but I’ll explain it all as we go along.
Before heading off into the mysterious and wondrous lands of computer science, you should have your 
equipment ready. As a Python programmer, I assume you have your own favorite text/code editor or integrated 
development environment—I’m not going to interfere with that. When it comes to Python versions, the book is 
written to be reasonably version-independent, meaning that most of the code should work with both the Python 2 and 
3 series. Where backward-incompatible Python 3 features are used, there will be explanations on how to implement 
the algorithm in Python 2 as well. (And if, for some reason, you’re still stuck with, say, the Python 1.5 series, most of 
the code should still work, with a tweak here and there.)
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See Chapter 2 for more on benchmarking and empirical evaluation of algorithms.

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Chapter 1 
■
 IntroduCtIon
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